It's a bad example. Here's some actual reporting on the health of the company: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/may/31/twitters-....

To say that "Elon has no doubt pissed off [...] some advertisers" is such a hilarious understatement.

Google Trends has literally nothing to do with twitter succeeding or failing as a business. Literally nothing. If twitter went offline, it would be skyrocketing in Google Trends, does that mean twitter is successful then?

Also: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1680082007873953794

It's not an example at all. It's just as baffling to use it as an example when there are much better sources.

Pre-Elon, you have financial statements showing the strength of the company. Profitable before Covid before they hired a massive number of people (like a lot of companies during covid) and then dropped below profitability. It's very possible that a smaller layoff and a focus on fundamentals could have brought them back to profitability.

Elon has admitted that they've lost around 50% in ad revenue since the takeover and that they're not cash-flow positive. Reports are saying 59%-70%. I'm inclined to believe that Elon is under reporting to the public (based on his history of exaggerating/under-reporting/lying about this kind of stuff). Either way, it's clear Twitter is in a much weaker position now than pre-takeover.

By far the best evidence is the ads one gets on Twitter now. I haven't been using it for about a month, but before I stopped, the ad deterioration was striking to the point of absurdity. It went from being like any other mainstream thing - sports or primetime on TV or google or instagram ads or whatever - to being the kind of stuff you get at 2am on local access channels. They struggled to have a competitive ad business for their size of audience before, and it could not be clear now that they are making absolute peanuts on ads now, and there's just no way subscription revenue is going to make up even a small sliver of that squandered advertising opportunity.

Twitter is dying and Musk might actually be OK with this. From a certain angle it clearly looks like that was the brute force plan all along (Hanlon’s razor not applied).

Maybe he just wants to build WeChat ultimately to be sold to the US government, in the same vain as with his other ventures where he runs on government subsidies and/or full-on exclusive privatization mandates.

Extrapolate a potential future for “x.com” from here with what economist Richard Wolff is seeing #trending for the west:

https://youtu.be/w0c5Gfh2ZWY

It’s the 50% drop in revenue with no viable path back combined with the huge brand damage he has done that is causing people to say it’s dying.

The only question left at this point is how soon.